{"id":78,"date":"2009-08-21T10:00:27","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T16:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/?p=78"},"modified":"2009-08-21T10:11:34","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T16:11:34","slug":"ambition-and-rankings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/21\/ambition-and-rankings\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambition and Rankings?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Lipshaw has an interesting comment on the rankings game, <a href=\"http:\/\/lawprofessors.typepad.com\/legal_profession\/2009\/08\/ambition-and-rankings-we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us.html\">Ambition and Rankings:\u00a0 &#8220;We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us&#8221;<\/a>.\u00a0 He begins by\u00a0noting a WSJ article by Eric Felten, who is of the view that &#8220;the rankings are really about getting ahead.&#8221;\u00a0 He then notes an discussion with a colleague about the Big Law School game&#8211;moving up to more prestigious law schools.\u00a0 He continues<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yes, I think the rankings do have something to do with our subjective views of getting ahead, and I do think there&#8217;s something about the legal profession that makes OUR rankings so powerful.\u00a0 I used the phrase &#8220;progressing up the food chain&#8221; with my colleague, and in what industries or professions is the food chain as quantitative as the legal profession?\u00a0 * * *<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;\u00a0there&#8217;s a lot of self-selection in the process of becoming a lawyer, and even more in becoming a big law firm lawyer or a law professor.\u00a0 I suspect the first element of that self-selection is a particular orientation to progressing up the food chain&#8230;.\u00a0 There ain&#8217;t that much to distinguish us&#8230;. There are only dozens and not thousands of law schools.\u00a0 * * * In other words, it&#8217;s easy to see a well-defined food chain in the relatively small, homogeneous, and closed legal community.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Most of the blogging about law-school rankings focuses on the top law schools, and sometimes as far down as the top 100.\u00a0 Perhaps that&#8217;s because they are the only schools individually ranked, but I don&#8217;t think so.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure that professors at top law schools really care about what happens on the other side of the <a href=\"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/18\/peer-assessments-and-the-great-divide\/\">Great Divide<\/a> in the legal academy (Tiers 3 and 4).\u00a0 If nothing else, the concerns of the lower-ranked schools are not the concerns of the elite.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>For example, during the debate about ABA Interpretation 301-6 and minimum law-school Bar passage standards, the blawgosphere was largely (entirely?) silent.\u00a0 Was that because the elite law schools, and even the top 100, don&#8217;t worry about the Bar?\u00a0 Yes, the occasional Top 100 Dean gets toppled when Bar passage rates slip.\u00a0 But the top law schools don&#8217;t measure themselves by the proportion of the graduates that can meet the minimum standards to be come a lawyer.\u00a0 That&#8217;s taken as a given.<\/p>\n<p>Gary Rosin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Lipshaw has an interesting comment on the rankings game, Ambition and Rankings:\u00a0 &#8220;We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us&#8221;.\u00a0 He begins by\u00a0noting a WSJ article by Eric Felten, who is of the view that &#8220;the rankings are really about getting ahead.&#8221;\u00a0 He then notes an discussion with a colleague about the Big [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-schools","category-rankings","tag-rankings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}